UNDER THE GREENWOOD TREE
or
THE MELLSTOCK QUIRE
A RURAL PAINTING OF THE DUTCH SCHOOL
PREFACE
This story of the Mellstock Quire and its old established west-
gallery musicians, with some supplementary descriptions of similar
officials in Two on a Tower, A Few Crusted Characters, and other
places, is intended to be a fairly true picture, at first hand, of
the personages, ways, and customs which were common among such
orchestral bodies in the villages of fifty or sixty years ago.
One is inclined to regret the displacement of these ecclesiastical
bandsmen by an isolated organist (often at first a barrel-organist)
or harmonium player; and despite certain advantages in point of
control and accomplishment which were, no doubt, secured by
installing the single artist, the change has tended to stultify the
professed aims of the clergy, its direct result being to curtail and
extinguish the interest of parishioners in church doings. Under the
old plan, from half a dozen to ten full-grown players, in addition
to the numerous more or less grown-up singers, were officially
occupied with the Sunday routine, and concerned in trying their best
to make it an artistic outcome of the combined musical taste of the
congregation. With a musical executive limited, as it mostly is
limited now, to the parson's wife or daughter and the school-
children, or to the school-teacher and the children, an important
union of interests has disappeared.
The zest of these bygone instrumentalists must have been keen and
staying to take them, as it did, on foot every Sunday after a
toilsome week, through all weathers, to the church, which often lay
at a distance from their homes. They usually received so little in
payment for their performances that their efforts were really a
labour of love. In the parish I had in my mind when writing the
present tale, the gratuities received yearly by the musicians at
Christmas were somewhat as follows: From the manor-house ten
shillings and a supper; from the vicar ten shillings; from the
farmers five shillings each; from each cottage-household one
shilling; amounting altogether to not more than ten shillings a head
annually--just enough, as an old executant told me, to pay for their
fiddle-strings, repairs, rosin, and music-paper (which they mostly
ruled themselves). Their music in those days was all in their own
manuscript, copied in the evenings after work, and their music-books
were home-bound.
It was customary to inscribe a few jigs, reels, horn-pipes, and
ballads in the same book, by beginning it at the other end, the
insertions being continued from front and back till sacred and
secular met together in the middle, often with bizarre effect, the
words of some of the songs exhibiting that ancient and broad humour
which our grandfathers, and possibly grandmothers, took delight in,
and is in these days unquotable.
The aforesaid fiddle-strings, rosin, and music-paper were supplied
by a pedlar, who travelled exclusively in such wares from parish to
parish, coming to each village about every six months. Tales are
told of the consternation once caused among the church fiddlers
when, on the occasion of their producing a new Christmas anthem, he
did not come to time, owing to being snowed up on the downs, and the
straits they were in through having to make shift with whipcord and
twine for strings. He was generally a musician himself, and
sometimes a composer in a small way, bringing his own new tunes, and
tempting each choir to adopt them for a consideration. Some of
these compositions which now lie before me, with their repetitions
of lines, half-lines, and half-words, their fugues and their
intermediate symphonies, are good singing still, though they would
hardly be admitted into such hymn-books as are popular in the
churches of fashionable society at the present time.
August 1896.
Under the Greenwood Tree was first brought out in the summer of 1872
in two volumes. The name of the story was originally intended to
be, more appropriately, The Mellstock Quire, and this has been
appended as a sub-title since the early editions, it having been
thought unadvisable to displace for it the title by which the book
first became known.
In rereading the narrative after a long interval there occurs the
inevitable reflection that the realities out of which it was spun
were material for another kind of study of this little group of
church musicians than is found in the chapters here penned so
lightly, even so farcically and flippantly at times. But
circumstances would have rendered any aim at a deeper, more
essential, more transcendent handling unadvisable at the date of
writing; and the exhibition of the Mellstock Quire in the following
pages must remain the only extant one, except for the few glimpses
of that perished band which I have given in verse elsewhere.
T. H.
April 1912.
PART THE FIRST--WINTER
CHAPTER I: MELLSTOCK-LANE
To dwellers in a wood almost every species of tree has its voice as
well as its feature. At the passing of the breeze the fir-trees sob
and moan no less distinctly than they rock; the holly whistles as it
battles with itself; the ash hisses amid its quiverings; the beech
rustles while its flat boughs rise and fall. And winter, which
modifies the note of such trees as shed their leaves, does not
destroy its individuality.
On a cold and starry Christmas-eve within living memory a man was
passing up a lane towards Mellstock Cross in the darkness of a
plantation that whispered thus distinctively to his intelligence.
All the evidences of his nature were those afforded by the spirit of
his footsteps, which succeeded each other lightly and quickly, and
by the liveliness of his voice as he sang in a rural cadence:
"With the rose and the lily
And the daffodowndilly,
The lads and the lasses a-sheep-shearing go."
The lonely lane he was following connected one of the hamlets of
Mellstock parish with Upper Mellstock and Lewgate, and to his eyes,
casually glancing upward, the silver and black-stemmed birches with
their characteristic tufts, the pale grey boughs of beech, the dark-
creviced elm, all appeared now as black and flat outlines upon the
sky, wherein the white stars twinkled so vehemently that their
flickering seemed like the flapping of wings. Within the woody
pass, at a level anything lower than the horizon, all was dark as
the grave. The copse-wood forming the sides of the bower interlaced
its branches so densely, even at this season of the year, that the
draught from the north-east flew along the channel with scarcely an
interruption from lateral breezes.
After passing the plantation and reaching Mellstock Cross the white
surface of the lane revealed itself between the dark hedgerows like
a ribbon jagged at the edges; the irregularity being caused by
temporary accumulations of leaves extending from the ditch on either
side.
The song (many times interrupted by flitting thoughts which took the
place of several bars, and resumed at a point it would have reached
had its continuity been unbroken) now received a more palpable
check, in the shape of "Ho-i-i-i-i-i!" from the crossing lane to
Lower Mellstock, on the right of the singer who had just emerged
from the trees.
"Ho-i-i-i-i-i!" he answered, stopping and looking round, though with
no idea of seeing anything more than imagination pictured.
"Is that thee, young Dick Dewy?" came from the darkness.
"Ay, sure, Michael Mail."
"Then why not stop for fellow-craters--going to thy own father's
house too, as we be, and knowen us so well?"
Dick Dewy faced about and continued his tune in an under-whistle,
implying that the business of his mouth could not be checked at a
moment's notice by the placid emotion of friendship.
Having come more into the open he could now be seen rising against
the sky, his profile appearing on the light background like the
portrait of a gentleman in black cardboard. It assumed the form of
a low-crowned hat, an ordinary-shaped nose, an ordinary chin, an
ordinary neck, and ordinary shoulders. What he consisted of further
down was invisible from lack of sky low enough to picture him on.
Shuffling, halting, irregular footsteps of various kinds were now
heard coming up the hill, and presently there emerged from the shade
severally five men of different ages and gaits, all of them working
villagers of the parish of Mellstock. They, too, had lost their
rotundity with the daylight, and advanced against the sky in flat
outlines, which suggested some processional design on Greek or
Etruscan pottery. They represented the chief portion of Mellstock
parish choir.
The first was a bowed and bent man, who carried a fiddle under his
arm, and walked as if engaged in studying some subject connected
with the surface of the road. He was Michael Mail, the man who had
hallooed to Dick.
The next was Mr. Robert Penny, boot- and shoemaker; a little man,
who, though rather round-shouldered, walked as if that fact had not
come to his own knowledge, moving on with his back very hollow and
his face fixed on the north-east quarter of the heavens before him,
so that his lower waist-coat-buttons came first, and then the
remainder of his figure. His features were invisible; yet when he
occasionally looked round, two faint moons of light gleamed for an
instant from the precincts of his eyes, denoting that he wore
spectacles of a circular form.
The third was Elias Spinks, who walked perpendicularly and
dramatically. The fourth outline was Joseph Bowman's, who had now
no distinctive appearance beyond that of a human being. Finally
came a weak lath-like form, trotting and stumbling along with one
shoulder forward and his head inclined to the left, his arms
dangling nervelessly in the wind as if they were empty sleeves.
This was Thomas Leaf.
"Where be the boys?" said Dick to this somewhat indifferently-
matched assembly.
The eldest of the group, Michael Mail, cleared his throat from a
great depth.
"We told them to keep back at home for a time, thinken they wouldn't
be wanted yet awhile; and we could choose the tuens, and so on."
"Father and grandfather William have expected ye a little sooner. I
have just been for a run round by Ewelease Stile and Hollow Hill to
warm my feet."
"To be sure father did! To be sure 'a did expect us--to taste the
little barrel beyond compare that he's going to tap."
"'Od rabbit it all! Never heard a word of it!" said Mr. Penny,
gleams of delight appearing upon his spectacle-glasses, Dick
meanwhile singing parenthetically--"The lads and the lasses a-sheep-
shearing go."
"Neighbours, there's time enough to drink a sight of drink now afore
bedtime?" said Mail.
"True, true--time enough to get as drunk as lords!" replied Bowman
cheerfully.
This opinion being taken as convincing they all advanced between the
varying hedges and the trees dotting them here and there, kicking
their toes occasionally among the crumpled leaves. Soon appeared
glimmering indications of the few cottages forming the small hamlet
of Upper Mellstock for which they were bound, whilst the faint sound
of church-bells ringing a Christmas peal could be heard floating
over upon the breeze from the direction of Longpuddle and
Weatherbury parishes on the other side of the hills. A little
wicket admitted them to the garden, and they proceeded up the path
to Dick's house.
